Martin S Olivier

Personal information

I am married to Mariëtte, a medical doctor who is
particularly interested in treating patients suffering from
HIV/Aids. She holds a joint appointment from Kalafong
Hospital in Pretoria and the University of Pretoria, and also
runs a private medical practice.

We have been fortunate to travel frequently. Academics are
expected to cooperate with their international peers and this
has taken us to a number of interesting places and given us
the opportunity to meet many interesting friends. A few of
the highlights (in pictures) have
been posted on a different page.

We share our house with five furry friends: Quartus and
Imka (the two Weimaraners), Lexi (the Labrador) and
Katernoster and Blanc de Noir (our cats).
Weimaraners are hunting dogs,
originally bred in Weimar. Weimar is a city in southeast
Germany that played an important part in German history and
was home to Goethe, Schiller and other notable figures. Here
Weimaraners were bred by German nobles at the court of Weimar
in the nineteenth century. Quartus is named so because he is
the fourth Weimaraner we have owned, having arrived at our
home about six months after Imka. Imka got her name from a
Germanic word for bee - an apt name given her energy
(that is, unfortunately, mostly spent on what remains of our
garden...). Just one of the many things that make Weimaraners
special: when the pups open their eyes, they are blue and
eventually turn to amber.

When Katernoster was about four weeks old he hitched a ride
(as a stowaway) when my brother and his family returned from a
holiday at Margate. When he arrived in Johannesburg he had a
broken jaw, but - being a wild cat - managed to evade us
for a couple of hours before we eventually managed to catch
him. Now - a few years later - he is a very happy
inhabitant of our house, with a slightly skew jaw to remind him
of those early days. And we have a new set of curtains...
And, in case you were wondering, Katernoster's name was derived
from the German for "male cat" and from the Latin for
"our". Blanc de Noir was found abandoned when the grass in a
veld behind Kalafong Hospital was mowed. At that stage he was
at most a few days old - and had to be bottle fed, drop by drop.
Strange cat: he loves dogs... (and people!).

We adopted Lexi after she turned out to be too lively for
her previous owners; luckily Imka and, especially, Quartus keep
her so busy that being lively is not really a problem
for us.

Our previous dogs, Hitler and Tasha, were already grown-up
dogs when they arrived at our home, names and all. Hitler
passed away due to illness at the age of eight in 2000. Tasha
reached the old age of thirteen, before she died in 2001.

The years 2000-2003 were also sad in another regard: Our
paths crossed those of politicians and investigative
journalists and we got some insight in how they (or at least,
some of them) operate. Since the details were beginning to
occupy too extensive a portion of my personal page, the
details about the politician, the media
and the drug trial are now posted on a different page.
Fortunately, as time goes by, the realisation that journalists
and politicians shouldn't be taken too seriously becomes
stronger, and one's attention returns to other, more positive,
interests.

One of these more pleasurable interests is reading. Our
home library consists of about 1000 books. These include
novels by our favourite authors such as Charles Dickens,
Wilbur Smith and Sydney Sheldon. They also include many books
that are probably only of historical interest, such as those
detailing programming in PL/1, Fortran and Cobol. And then
there are reference books about topics that we find (or found)
interesting, as well as quite a few books from bargain
basements that we simply couldn't resist.